Grr, Argh She Said or Why is it Taking Me So &#!% Long to Write??

Ok, so here’s the thing.  I have whined before about “real” writing and not having enough time and things being surprisingly slow-going and taking surprisingly longer than I had anticipated when I set out on this Great Writing Endeavor.  I have complained that words and ideas don’t translate as readily as I thought they would, that new ideas keep forcing their own way into my head and then onto my laptop, and that said ideas keep morphing into new things and thus taking longer and longer to “finish” in any way.

I am not whining like that again.

I am whining in an entirely new way.  (teehee)

So in an attempt to keep morale high here in my study and to try to put my “real” work out into the world sooner, I had a Brilliant Idea.  I am prone to Brilliant Ideas.  Seriously – that is not bragging.  I am.  What I am not prone to, however, is translating said BIs into tangible, practical things.  For that I usually need help.  But this time I arrived at said tangible, practical thing all by my lonesome.  I told myself, “Self, you have written a lot of short fiction, why don’t you put them all into one document and see if it’s publishable?”

Excellent suggestion, no?  Turns out, no.

Why, you ask?  Because it turns out that all my short stories and flash fiction pieces that I have so cleverly and carefully prepared, both those that have been published here on Jill-Elizabeth.com and the few that I have hoarded away for possible contest submission are woefully inadequate as far as a body of work goes.  There are twelve of them – a respectable number, I thought.  But they total a paltry 22,000-some words.  For those of you not in the know, that’s about one-third of a book.  Sigh, she said.

Now, I know I should be happy about this.  I have a goal with tangible progress.  I have written tens of thousands of words.  I have a dozen stories under my belt.  And this isn’t even counting any of the “real” longer writing – the book chapters written, the longer pieces of fiction that are in progress, the short story still in development.  As The Fiancee pointed out, “you’re a third of the way to a book!”  Of course, to me, Queen of Impatient, that idea translates to: “you are only a third of the way to a book… [insert groan here]”

It feels like I’ve been writing forever.  It feels like I’ve written so much more than that (and if effort counted like words, well, let’s just say it feels like I should have six novels ready to go).  It feels like I should have more than this accomplished by this point.

Grr, arggh, she said.

And then, out of nowhere…  SLAP!

Teehee.  Don’t fear.  The Fiancee hasn’t resorted to physical violence to snap me out of my melancholia.  Oh no – he would never do such a thing.  I slapped myself.

Why, you ask?  Because I’ve only had the blog since March, only really been writing fiction in any sort of regular way since April.  It’s July.  Early July.  Last month I wrote over 25,000 words.  I have twelve stories ready to go, five novels (or at least novellas) in progress, several contest submissions submitted, a six-page spreadsheet of ideas, a blog word document with nearly two hundred pages, and numerous guest posts on various sites that are posted and/or planned.  I have a blog with hundreds of followers (adding all the various ways people follow) and post to it five days a week.  Strangers take time out of their lives to read and more-than-occasionally comment on my writing, to ask me to review their books or help them publicize their writing efforts.  So what if I don’t have a book written just yet.  I’ve only been writing for THREE AND A HALF FREAKING MONTHS.  Perhaps it’s not a mark of utter failure that I didn’t whip out a nine-hundred page best-selling masterpiece in the first quarter of my “professional” writing career.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not going all complacent, glass-half-full, Goddess of Optimism here.  I’m not letting myself off the hook, not bragging.  All I’m trying to do is keep my expectations realistic and to maybe, just maybe, stop killing myself with guilt (and you with whining) because I’m not finished just yet.

I’m sure you will read more whining, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not the cold-turkey quitting kind, and my negativity is fairly well-entrenched.  But I’m going to try to take a load off and focus on the journey not just the destination (thanks Jim McGee for sharing that essay so many years ago, we miss you and you helped me more than you could ever know with that one!).  And maybe, just maybe, in doing so I will get there a lot saner – and possibly even a little bit faster. 🙂